The Republican Honeymoon May Be Over Before It Begins
Sooner or later, both marital and political honeymoons come to an end. It’s rare, however, for a honeymoon to end before the nuptials have been exchanged. With the nominations of Tulsi Gabbard as national intelligence director, former Rep. Matt Gaetz as attorney general, Pete Hegseth as Defense secretary, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary, President-elect Trump would seem to be trying to cancel the airline and hotel reservations before the ceremony has even commenced.
Some of Trump’s other nominees, such as Sen. Marco Rubio as secretary of State and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum as Interior secretary, are ones that many more-conventional Republican presidents-elect might have chosen. But it is a decent bet that Gabbard, Gaetz, Hegseth, and Kennedy will not all be seated around the Cabinet Room table. How many the Senate will reject isn’t yet clear.
For what it is worth, the last time the Senate rejected a Cabinet nominee was in 1989, when President George H.W. Bush nominated Sen. John Tower of Texas to be Defense secretary. The nomination failed on a 47-53 vote amid allegations of Tower's excessive drinking, inappropriate behavior with women, and improper ties to defense contractors. Of course many other nominations have been withdrawn, some before their names had been officially transmitted to the Senate, others after. Trump had three nominees who failed to launch, as did Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. George W. Bush had two.
In this era of extreme, negative partisanship, it is easier than ever for a senator from the opposition party to vote against a Cabinet nominee, but it is much harder for one from a president’s own party to oppose. Needless to say, this will not be a fun time to be a Republican senator.
A good argument can be made that a GOP senator contemplating opposing one or more of these four dubious choices may be far more concerned by the blowback from within their own party thanby attacks from a Democrat in a general election.
With 23 Senate Republicans up for reelection, compared to just 11 Democrats, theoretically, the GOP will be on the defense. In reality, however, the GOP seats are in many of the reddest, most reliably Republican states in the country. Only two at this point are even plausibly competitive: those held by Susan Collins in Maine and Thom Tillis in North Carolina. Even if Democrats end up capturing both seats, they would only be halfway to the four-seat gain needed to regain a majority.
But the danger facing a GOP senator who offends the MAGA wing is a primary challenge from a conservative or populist candidate. That’s why we may not see another edition of Profiles in Courage head to the printer early next year.
Trump will likely lose some altitude at a time when most newly elected presidents are still sky-high in their poll ratings. It is not hard to imagine this becoming the third time in a row that a newly elected president has misread their election, mistaking a modest margin for a mandate, not appreciating the extent to which their victory was based not on who they were or what they said, but upon who their opponent was and what their predecessor had done.
Self-proclaiming a mandate is a cardinal sin in politics; anyone thinking that voters gave Trump a mandate on Nov. 5 is sadly mistaken. Democrats are understandably shaken and disappointed by Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss, but Trump’s sweep of all seven swing states was hardly a landslide. His victories of 0.9 points in Wisconsin, 1.4 points in Michigan,1.75 in Pennsylvania, 2.19 in Georgia, 3.1 in Nevada, and 3.32 in North Carolina were impressive yet still within the margin of error for most polls. Only his 5.54-point win in Arizona was worth a raised eyebrow.
Given how few Democrats ended up having problems beneath the presidential race on the ballot, it is clear that the election was a highly focused, targeted repudiation of the Biden-Harris administration.Republicans seem likely to emerge from this election with about 221 or 222 seats in the House, effectively identical to the 221 they held going in, with five seats yet to be decided.
In the Senate, while Democrats did lose their majority, three of their four losses were in states that Trump carried in 2016, 2020, and 2024, making it easy to conclude that God doesn’t intend forDemocrats to occupy seats in Montana, Ohio, and West Virginia at this point in time. The fourth came in the decidedly purple state of Pennsylvania. The reality is that Democrats held four of the five purple states they were defending, hanging onto open seats in Arizona and Michigan and seeing bothTammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and Jacky Rosen of Nevada getting reelected. Winning four out of the five purple-state Senate races is not something that happens in a wave election for the other party.
To top things off, none of the 11 gubernatorial races this year saw a change in party, and turnover on the state legislative level was also minimal.
Republicans on Capitol Hill have to wonder what it will be like to go four years with a President Trump who knows he will never have to face voters again, even though they will. Some of these early pick shave to give at least a few the gnawing feeling that this will be a very long four years. To the extent that they are virtually married to him for these next four years, this may be a bad omen.
This article was originally published for the National Journal on Nov. 18, 2024.